I Need Your Help

17 December 2024

In 16 years and over 700 posts, I’ve never asked for a dime. Today, I’m asking. (Names marked with an asterisk* have been changed to protect privacy.)

Every Saturday night at 5:00 pm, I open up the doors of a place down on South Broadway. It’s called Centerpoint, and it’s a church of sorts, specifically for homeless (and homeless-adjacent) folks. Every week, my friend Shawn* and a few other people will be outside waiting when we open; more will filter in as the evening progresses. The room is well-lit and comfortable enough: warm in winter and cool in summer. There’s tables and chairs and music. A few steps from the door, the smell of supper hits you. We’ve had everything from chili and fry bread to spaghetti to grilled chicken to falafel and Lebanese food. Our volunteers are amazing cooks.

For the next couple hours, this place will be our guests’ refuge from the weather, but honestly, that’s the least of it. “Tim, I haven’t talked with another human since last week when I was sitting in this same chair talking to you,” Roger* told me one evening back in 2020. “People don’t make eye contact,” he said. “They pretend you’re invisible.” I’ve never forgotten that. The most important thing we do here is treat people made in the image of God like they’re the image of God, no matter how they show up.

Some are barefoot, clothed in tatters. Some are high or drunk. “I have three simple rules,” I tell them. “Don’t come in drunk, don’t start a fight, and if you don’t start a fight, we’ll pretend you didn’t come in drunk.” As long as it’s safe for everybody, we’re here for it. We mean it when we tell you to come as you are. Even stone cold sober, some of our folks are so mentally ill they have a hard time staying in touch with reality.

Those conversations can get really wild. I’ve been told about how Martin Luther King won the Revolutionary War, how the city council is trying to sell all the parks, how all the churches and judges and cops in this town are conspiring to squeeze the homeless (it’s all about money, somehow), how the Council of Nicaea set up a satanic communion ritual in place of the Passover. Some of these we let pass; others we discuss in more detail. We also get a surprising amount of cult nonsense, both from the usual suspects and some that are new to me. Most recently, I was informed that the existence of God the Father implies God the Mother, who is apparently a Korean woman. “Jesus said He’d come back from the East,” Jack* said. “You can’t get any further east of Jerusalem than Korea.”

“You are welcome here any time,” I told him. “That stuff is not.” He ate his supper and left. On the way out the door, he looked back at me. “I’m trying to help you,” he said. I wasn’t sure he’d be back, but he drifts in about once a month. (He still believes that cult has a corner on the truth. We’re working on it.)

Some folks barely say a word to us. They’ll bolt down their food and leave as fast as they can. Or they’ll eat, then lay their head on the table and fall asleep. Our new volunteers sometimes ask if that bothers me (to middle-class people, it feels disrespectful). No, I tell them. Where else can these folks sleep safely, even for an hour? Here, you’re safe. Nobody will hurt you, nobody will steal your stuff. It’s an honor to be trusted that way; we’ve earned that trust, and I’m proud of it.

Some will ask about resources: a tarp, a sleeping bag, food, housing, jobs, socks, a place to get mail. We have strategic partnerships with organizations that do all those things, and we direct them to the right place. For the last few years, we’ve been blessed to have Micah–my daughter in the faith–work with me on Saturday nights and with one of our partner organizations, a day program that’s open Tuesdays and Thursdays. She furnishes a bridge from us to a lot of those services, and invites people from the day programs to come join us. (And we’re paying her so little that honestly, it’s embarrassing. I’d love to be able to pay her better.) Micah’s also a serious church history nerd, and it’s been great to have her bring facts and logic to the weirder conversations about church history.

Not all the conversations are weird. Some of it’s just ordinary life: romantic difficulties, friendship troubles, difficulties at work. (Not-so-fun fact: quite a number of our homeless folks have some sort of job. They just can’t afford rent anywhere.) Often a Bible study will break out as we talk about one thing and another. I’ve delivered sermons down here, but the best things I’ve ever said have probably been in the impromptu Bible studies, dealing directly with someone’s immediate concerns. Sometimes the questions are more theological, and we can do that too. I’ve been telling people for years that we only do three things: good food, good company–hey, here you are!–and a little bit of church. The Bible studies are part of that.

Around 6:30, we’ll have a brief communion service. We preach the gospel: “…we proclaim the Lord’s death til He comes, and that means we look back to the day that Jesus was nailed to the cross, and every sin, every character flaw, every weakness, every sickness, every dark thing that stands between you and God–all of it was nailed to the cross with Jesus. Died on the cross with Jesus. Was buried in the earth with Jesus. And when God raised Him from the grave three days later, He did not come out dragging a Hefty bag of your crap. It’s gone; He took care of it all. We look forward to the day when Jesus brings His resurrected people to a resurrected earth, and we live with our God forever, apart from sin and sickness, the way we were always meant to.” We commission our people: “You are blessed with the presence of Christ here so that you can go out into the world and be the presence of Christ there. So go, and be a blessing!”

Some do. Long-term, being a blessing usually means finding fruitful work and getting off the streets, but there are a lot of short-term ways to bless. I’ve seen Jesus-following homeless people share food, shelter, life-saving information. One 10-degree night, I saw Bob* give up his spot in a shelter to help a newly homeless kid who literally didn’t even have a coat. He may have saved that kid’s life.

When 7:00 rolls around, we close. After our guests leave, we clean up and debrief as necessary. We fight for every quarter-inch of growth with our guests, but our volunteers grow like weeds. It’s a challenging ministry, and it quickly and deeply teaches the value of human connection in a way that very few ministries do. Over the years, many of our volunteers have moved on to other ministries, seasoned by their time with us. It’s an honor to be part of their journeys. (A couple of them even ended up getting married! I got to do the wedding, and that was really sweet.)

A few years ago, I started a periodic study group. After Centerpoint closes, we work through a book of the Bible in Greek. It was always a very niche market, and in the end, only Micah stuck with it. Her exegetical skills have grown by leaps and bounds, and I’m proud of her progress. We’ve worked through Jude, 1 and 2 John, and we just finished Philemon. She’s been interested in tackling a longer book, so we’re starting 1 Timothy. I’d love to recruit more people into that study. (If you’re in Denver, you’ve had first-year Greek, and you’re willing to come help feed folks a couple Saturdays a month, give me a shout!)

That’s it. That’s what we do.

Look, I’ve never been good at fundraising, and I’m still not. But we get all this done for under $3,000 a month, and we need help. In the past a handful of organizations have been very generous with good-sized one-time gifts, but that money will run out in March, and as far as I can see, there’s no more where it came from.

I think this work is worth doing, and if y’all will help us fund it, we’ll keep doing it. Like I said, we can sustain everything we’re doing right now for less than $3,000 a month.

If we can’t continue, well, we can’t. Most ministries die eventually. If Centerpoint’s time has come, that’s in the hands of God. But although March is our snowiest month, April and May can be pretty rough, and I’d hate to stop when the weather’s still nasty. So the very least I’d like is $6,000 to get us through the end of May.

If you’d like to help us out, instructions are below. As my friends with the cardboard signs say, “Anything helps!”

The easiest way to donate is through our online campaign with Zeffy. Click that link, and follow the instructions.

If you prefer Paypal, the associated email address is rcvrchurchonline@gmail.com. Put “Centerpoint” in the comment box, and the funds will make their way to us. (You’ll see the church’s legal name as Englewood First Assembly of God. That’s us.)

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Reason, Excuse, and Apology

10 December 2024

A friend recently explained a situation that keeps recurring for her. In the wake of some situation or other, someone will ask her, “Why did you do it that way?” She’ll begin to answer the question, only to get cut off with “I don’t want to hear your excuses!”

“What is going on with this?” she asked. “What’s the difference between a reason and an excuse, anyway?”

Defining reason versus excuse is fairly straightforward. In a nutshell, a reason is just a factual account of the process: A led to B led to C. An excuse has an additional moral dimension to it; it’s an attempt to exculpate yourself. Put another way, “reason” is the historical explanation for why you did what you did; “excuse” is a moral explanation for why something isn’t your fault.

But of course it’s more complicated than that, because most people asking “the “Why did you do it that way?” aren’t all that clear on the distinction between reason and excuse, and often aren’t consciously aware of what they want from the conversation. There are pitfalls to navigate both in the question they ask and the answer you give.

  1. The question can mean two very different things.
    1a. Sometimes “Why did you do it that way?” is a rhetorical question, grounded in the assumption that “that way” was a self-evidently foolish decision. In that case, the question is functioning as a demand for an apology, and the expected response is something like “I’m sorry; I don’t know what I was thinking.” From within that frame of reference, describing your thought process registers as an attempt to avoid taking responsibility for your actions, and therefore triggers the “Don’t make excuses” response.
    At that point, you may be tempted to respond in anger: “If you didn’t want to know, why did you ask?” As you probably already know, that’s not likely to be productive. Rhetorical questions are a pretty normal communication strategy, even if you don’t happen to like them. Making war on an entire category of normal communication isn’t likely to take you where you want to go.
    The best way I’ve found to navigate that is to just ask: “Are you actually asking about the thought process, or are you hoping I’ll just apologize so we can move on?” If I’m not sure I did anything wrong, I’ll often add, “I’m not making any promises here, I’m just curious about what you’re hoping for.” Then we can navigate from there.
    1b. Sometimes the question really is a request for information, but that doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods. Often, even when the asker is genuinely trying to understand, they are also seeking assurance you won’t do the thing again. They often won’t explicitly tell you that’s what they’re hoping for; it’s so self-evident to them that it just won’t occur to them to articulate it. If your explanation does not provide the hoped-for reassurance, the asker can grow frustrated, and that frustration can trigger the “Don’t make excuses” response.
    If you started with the recommended clarifying questions in 1a, above, then at this point you can loop back to them. “You said you were asking about the thought process; I’m telling you, and you’re clearly frustrated with it. What are you hoping for at this point?” Please note that this response does not accuse them of hypocrisy or blame them for being frustrated; it just situates the present moment in the conversation and invites them to clarify what they want.
  2. All of the above can be rendered far more effective by three additional things.
    2a. Be the sort of person who simply doesn’t lie about this stuff. That means you don’t say you were wrong if you don’t think you were, but once you think you were wrong about something, you don’t avoid saying so, even if other people aren’t owning their part. (You can take time to calm down, sleep on it, seek wise counsel, retain an attorney, etc., as appropriate to the situation. There’s a certain personality that’s tempted to immediately assume the blame for everything in order to ease the tension in a situation; you shouldn’t give in to that temptation either.) You can and should be exquisitely clear about what you are and aren’t taking ownership of, but if you’re sure it’s wrong and it’s yours, don’t shilly-shally around, looking for a way out. This is a superpower that leads to other superpowers, and over time, it dramatically cuts down on the nonsense in your life. Being willing to take responsibility for your errors attracts like-minded people, and clearly refusing what’s not yours repels those who are trying to evade responsibility.
    2b. Have a deep understanding of apology. Not everybody is looking for the same thing. “I’m sorry” is an expression of regret. (It usually helps to be very clear about what you regret. “I’m sorry I did that” and “I’m sorry you got hurt” are two very different sentiments.) “I was wrong” is a moral or factual determination. “Please forgive me” is a request for forgiveness. “I see that my actions resulted in __ for you” is an expression of empathy. “I won’t do it again” is a reassurance. People seeking apology and reconciliation often are seeking some blend of these, and usually won’t be consciously aware what they’re looking for. Know that it can be any or all of the above, and navigate the conversation accordingly.
    In my family of origin, a proper apology was “I was wrong when I [clearly state what you did]. Will you forgive me?”
    2c. You can pre-empt a good bit of all this by being clear up front in how you answer the “Why did you do it that way?” question. I often start by saying, “Listen, if I was wrong, I’ll have to own it. I’m not making excuses for myself. But since you asked, here’s what happened….” At crucial points in my account, I often insert little reminders: “Again, I’m not making excuses here; I’m just telling you how this was for me” or “Of course I now see things differently, but at the time, here’s what I was thinking.”

Now, all this comes with an important caveat. If you need everything to be someone else’s fault, none of the communication strategies I’ve laid out above will do you any good, because in the end the problem is not in the communication, it’s in your heart. That doesn’t mean there’s no hope; it just means you need Jesus to free you from your sin and nonsense. Ask Him to; it’s a prayer He delights to answer.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Sax in the (New) City

3 December 2024

The best saxophone player to ever grace planet Earth was born in North Africa in 425 BC. She lived her whole life without ever touching a saxophone. Some day 8,000 years from now in the New Jerusalem, she’s going to pick up a saxophone for the first time ever, and we’re all going to be astounded. 

It’s going to take another thousand years before you and I get to hear her. She doesn’t like crowds all that much, and prefers to play really intimate venues. When we try to get her to play somewhere big so more people can enjoy it, she just laughs. “Are you afraid we’ll run out of time?” Gotta admit, she’s got us there.

Of course this little parable is exactly that—a parable. Even if (God’s sense of humor being what it is) every word of it turns out to be true, there’s certainly no way I could know that now. And that’s exactly my point. We live in the constant presence of an eternity so wide and deep we can’t actually know its extent, and yet we must live in a way that takes it into account.

This is one of the holy uses of imagination, as over against knowledge: imagination helps us reckon with realities too big to know. It helps us steer in the right direction, even when we don’t quite know where exactly we’re going, or what it will look like.

We know we are built for eternity. This life fits us out for eternity, but after we die, the vast majority of our life is still in front of us. (Side note: if you’re worried that you’re not living up to your potential, rest assured, you’re not. There’s not a ghost of a chance that anybody built for eternity could realize all that potential in a mere 80 years.) We know that, handcrafted for eternity, we are bound for the New Jerusalem, where we will encounter the saints of all the ages who are also bound for the same destination. What will that look like? We have very little idea, and yet we need to live our lives in light of the truths we know.

And so we feed our imaginations on the wild things that might be possible in such a reality…because the reality God made really is that wild.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

An Example They Don’t Understand

26 November 2024

Back in my days running the sound board for my church, I quickly learned that invisibility is the key attribute of a sound tech. Everybody in the house should hear everybody on stage effortlessly, and everybody on stage should hear themselves and each other effortlessly, just as if there were no electronic amplification involved at all. For a young man both interested in technical things and possessed of a young man’s ego and hunger for recognition, it was a perfect lab for character formation: if I did the job well, nobody gave me a second thought.

The only time anybody looks back at the sound booth is when something goes wrong: they can’t hear a soloist or a speaker, there’s a sudden screech of feedback, or some such. Those mistakes are obvious enough; everybody knows they’re happening. But there’s another, more subtle type of mistake.

When the mix is off just a bit—one voice a little too high, another instrument a little too low, too much reverb here, just a touch too little mids there, that sort of thing—nobody looks back at the booth. But there’s an unease in the room. They can’t consciously name what’s going on; half of them are not consciously aware that anything’s going on. But there’s a wrongness you can feel, a restlessness in the crowd.

I learned to pick up on that restlessness as a newbie. The problem was, as a newbie, I was barely half a step ahead of the crowd. I know something was wrong, because I could see them reacting to it. But I often had no idea what was wrong, or how to fix it. The one thing I had going for me was blind instinct. I’d just get my hands on the knobs and start adjusting—a little too far this way; a little too far that way; back until it felt right, then stop. Move on to the next control. I couldn’t tell you, much of the time, what the needed adjustment was. I couldn’t consciously hear it, and after dancing all over the sound board, I usually couldn’t tell you which adjustment made the difference. But I’d get done making adjustments, and it just felt right to me. I could see the difference in the room, too: people would settle back in their seats, quit fiddling with their bulletins, just sing along with the music.

My fellow sound techs, including the guys who trained me, noticed. I remember more than one of them asking me “What did you do? That sounded good!”

I would just shrug. “I adjusted it until it felt right.”

In those days, we were blessed to have members of the music group Glad as part of the church, and sometimes Ed Nalle would sing on a special occasion. I vividly remember Heidi, Ed’s wife, coming back to the sound booth on multiple occasions. “Can’t you hear that?” she would ask. No, I couldn’t. Then she’d grab a chair, turn it around backwards, and half-sit on the chair back in front of the board. She’d reach up and make a couple of adjustments. It would sound better.

Unlike me, Heidi knew exactly what she was hearing, and knew exactly what to adjust. She ought to; she’d been running sound for decades. She had words for things I wasn’t even sure I heard, and as far as I could tell, she was never wrong. Looking back, I probably could have learned a lot more from her, but it honestly never occurred to me to ask her to stick around after service and show me what she’d adjusted and why. I don’t know that I’d have had the nerve; she was a seasoned, working pro, and I was a barely-trained amateur. So I just stood at her elbow and watched. I tried (failing, half the time) to hear exactly what difference each adjustment made. But sometimes I could hear the difference, and those times made me a better sound tech, just by watching Heidi’s example.

Why am I telling you this?

Because we rub shoulders every day with people who are the moral equivalent of barely-trained me, back in the day. The world these days makes them uneasy, and they’re not sure why. They don’t quite have words for it. Of course, there’s little they can do outside their own lives to influence the mix, but even in their own lives, most of the time, they have no idea what they’re doing. A little of this…oops, that was too much; dial it back. A little of that….

Catechized by a culture that’s abandoned special revelation and at war with natural revelation, they don’t even suspect the existence of instructions that could help them. The culture has worked very hard to make them deaf. But the image of God is still within them, and a sinful, broken world hurts them even though they don’t know why they hurt.

As Christians, we hear what they don’t. Sometimes, we can explain; other times, they’re so deaf they can’t hear us anyway. What we can always do is what Heidi did for me: be an example. Half the time, they won’t be able to tell why we’re doing what we’re doing, just like half of what Heidi did was completely opaque to me. But the other half the time, they’ll be able to tell the difference. Maybe not anything they quite have words for, but it just feels better somehow. So even if you don’t know how to explain yourself, even if you know they wouldn’t get it even if you could explain well, just be an example they don’t understand. Your very existence shows them that a better way is possible.

Of course, you’re only an example if they can see you. Let the unbelievers around you into your life. In a culture that often hates us, we’re tempted to just hide. Don’t. Let them see you. “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven.”

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Posted by Tim Nichols

The Hall of Faith

26 November 2024

This week, I noticed that this will be the 700th post on Full Contact Christianity. It’s been a privilege to serve y’all here for the past 16 years. Thank you for reading!

A lot has changed since that first post in May of 2008. I still teach exegesis, but no longer in a seminary. I still serve a house church, but I also spend Saturday evenings with my homeless neighbors. I practice a trade — bodywork — alongside my ministry these days. A lot has changed in our world, too. Among the many changes, podcasts have become a thing.

Of recent, I got a chance to discuss Hebrews 11 with Chris Morrison of Gulfside Ministries and 2 Peter 3 with Joe Anderson of The Anchor Drop podcast. Hope they’re helpful to you!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Can We Afford It?

20 November 2024

Treating someone graciously is a form of generosity. As with all forms of generosity, graciousness is greatly cramped when we don’t think we can afford it. This is true whether we can actually afford it or not.

Say we have a single mother in the church who asks one of the men in the church to come look at her tires. It seems to her that something’s wrong, she says. He goes out into the parking lot, and the tire has a great big bulge in the sidewall.

“I don’t get paid until Friday,” she says, “and I have to pay rent out of that. Do you think it can wait until I get paid again in two weeks?”

No, it cannot. Now suppose as they’re talking about how she really shouldn’t delay replacing the tire, another fellow walks over and also takes a look. He agrees with the first guy that the tire should be replaced immediately.

Now suppose that one of these guys has $30,000 in the bank and no pressing need for it, while the other has $700 to his name, and his own rent payment looming at the end of the week. Which one of these guys is going to help this lady pay for tires?

You’d be tempted to say that of course the first guy will do it, but if you’ve been around people a little, you know better than to be so sure. We’ve all known people with tens of thousands of dollars who didn’t think they could afford to part with ten bucks, and we’ve all known people with only a few hundred who would buy you lunch if you looked hungry. Generosity does not depend only on some objective measure of what you can afford. Generosity depends on what you believe you can afford.

The guy with a few hundred bucks to his name, who goes and buys the lady’s tires? He believes that God has been good to him. He believes that God has given him everything he has, and everything he has is therefore at God’s disposal. He believes that God put him here to help take care of the tires, and that God knows the rent is due at the end of the week, and He will take care of it. He knows himself to be living in the lap of God’s largesse; why would he struggle to share? “You can’t outgive God!” he’ll say. Or “I shovel it out, and God shovels it in, and He’s got the bigger shovel.”

I’ve known a bunch of guys like that over the years; had occasion to be one now and again. Let me tell ya: it’s a lot of fun giving God’s money to people who need it! You maybe feel a little dumb come Friday afternoon and you’re still not sure how the rent gets paid, but you know what? I’ve seen God come through over and over and over again. (Standard disclaimer: It’s possible to overdo giving just like it’s possible to overdo anything else. I’m not saying you should just be a moron with your money; I’m saying you should be generally wise, and also know that at any given moment, God might call you to do something that looks really foolish. He gets to do that; everything you have is His. When He does, know that He’s got your back, and He’s good for it.)

To return to the observation I began this post with, it’s not just money. I digressed into money because money is easy to talk about, but you can be generous (or not) with any resource you have. It might be your time, your effort, your expertise. It might be a little space on your web server, or a little space in your garage for someone to store a couple boxes. It might be a late-night run out to the airport to pick up an old friend’s stranded kid, and another run back out there in the morning to get the kid on the next flight out. It might be your sympathy. It might mean showing grace to someone who–this being the meaning of grace–doesn’t deserve a bit of it.

In any of these cases, the key to generosity is the belief that you can afford it, and that, in turn, depends on your gratitude for what God has given you. This is particularly the case with showing sympathy, moral grace.

People who feel a need to signal virtue, people whose virtue is brittle, shallow, only skin-deep, can’t afford to be generous. It would endanger their fragile bona fides. They need to be hard on others, critical, scathing even, lest somebody begin to wonder if they themselves are somehow soft on that particular sin. When you’re about the impossible task of establishing your own righteousness, there’s no audience too small or occasion too petty.

Go thou, and do un-likewise. But this is not something you’re likely to be able to fake, or to muscle through as a raw exercise in self-control. You should be a deep and genuine conduit of God’s grace, and that means you need to become grateful for God’s grace to you. So begin to meditate on God’s grace to you. If you need a place to start, you could do worse than Ephesians 2:1-10. Let’s get about it.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Second Part of the Lesson

12 November 2024

In Deuteronomy 8, Moses is preparing the generation that is about to enter Canaan. Other than Joshua and Caleb, the oldest of them are just shy of 60. They are now facing the challenges their fathers balked at, all the reasons that they have been wandering in the desert these past 40 years. At this crucial juncture in their lives, Moses reminds them of the lessons they have learned during their years of maturation in the desert.

“So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD.” (Deuteronomy 8:3)

You got hungry in the desert, Moses reminds them. This is not idle wishing for luxuries; food is a legitimate need. Their legitimate need was going unmet. Fathers had nothing to feed their crying children. Mothers with nursing infants had nothing to eat themselves; how would they feed the baby? This was no accident, Moses says. It was not poor logistical planning on God’s part. He knew exactly what He was doing. God could have fed you at any moment; he could have made sure you never missed a meal. He could have made sure you had enough food for breakfast and second breakfast and elevensies, and lunch, and afternoon tea, and….

God allowed you to be hungry. That’s the first part of the lesson. Then what? “…and fed you with manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know.” When you were days into the desert with nothing edible in sight, your belly gnawing at your backbone…food miraculously fell out of the sky. And not just any food; something you’d never seen before, something so unexpected that you named it “What is it?” (That’s what “manna” literally means in Hebrew.) When you asked God for food, you had something in mind–a loaf of bread, a cucumber, whatever–but this wasn’t it. This…this is entirely different than anything you imagined. Reflecting on this moment, Asaph will later write:

“He had commanded the clouds above,
And opened the doors of heaven,
Had rained down manna on them to eat,
And given them of the bread of heaven.
Men ate angels’ food;
He sent them food to the full.”
(Psalm 78:23-25)

Angels’ food. I was talking through this passage with my daughter yesterday, and she said, “I wonder what the nutrition facts are on manna?” It had to be pretty nourishing, since it seems that at times they had nothing else to eat. And it tasted “like wafers made with honey” according to Exodus 16:31. That’s pretty good for health food! That’s the second part of the lesson: God meets your needs, miraculously, in a way you never imagined.

Now comes the punchline. Why would God choose to do it this way? Why not just feed them to start with? “…that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD.” God is not teaching you that you don’t really need bread; you do, actually. He’s teaching you that in the end, you can’t just live on bread. You need Him! And not just a little of Him: every word that comes from His mouth. You need food, make no mistake–but you need the food He is going to provide. Nothing else will do.

In other words, you need to humbly depend on God, which is how Moses introduced the thought to start with: “He humbled you….”

Now fast-forward to Jesus’ day. After His baptism, Jesus is led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days of fasting. We often imagine that Jesus spends the fast in serene communion with the Father, and then faces three temptations at the end, but no. Luke records that Jesus was “being tempted for 40 days by the devil.” The three temptations recorded at the end of the fast are the grand finale, the crescendo of 40 solid days of spiritual attack.

In a masterpiece of biblical understatement, both Matthew and Luke record that at the end of the fast, “He was hungry.” Imagine you’d found Jesus in the desert just at the halfway point, 20 days into His fast. He’s had nothing to eat for almost 3 weeks. He’s already going to be looking gaunt and emaciated, yes? What would you say that He needed at that point? Food, of course! And you wouldn’t be wrong–somebody who hasn’t eaten in nearly 3 weeks desperately needs a meal.

What is God doing about Jesus’ legitimate need? He’s waiting. He’s humbling Jesus, allowing Him to be hungry. At the pinnacle of that hunger, the devil hits him with “If You are the Son of God, command this stone to become bread.”

We’ve talked about this temptation elsewhere, so I won’t repeat all that here. But I saw something new in my most recent pass through this passage, and I think it’s worth pointing out. Jesus quotes from Moses’ speech in Deuteronomy: “Man does not live by bread alone; but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.” He’s drawing on the narrative resources of His people to read the situation He’s in; that much I knew. But Jesus hasn’t experienced the second part of the lesson yet. He’s still in part one, literally starving in the wilderness. Because Jesus knows the story of His people, He has learned from their experience. Knowing where He is in the story, He can anticipate what will come next. The angels’ food is just around the corner. So He hits the devil with the punchline, and when He has triumphed over all the temptations, Matthew tells us, “angels came and ministered to Him.”

What do you think they brought Him to eat?

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Micro-Christendom in Practice

4 November 2024

I got to guest on a podcast this past week. “Micro-Christendoms and Local Government” released a few days ago. It’s episode 24 of The Civitas Podcast, hosted by Peter Leithart and James Wood.

The Civitas Project is a mostly an academic endeavor out of Theopolis Institute, focused on what they’re calling “ecclesiocentric postliberalism.” That’s a jawbreaker of a term, but it describes a very practical reality. The classical liberal order–the political and social world championed by the likes of John Locke and John Stuart Mill–is dying. The old-line secular liberals weren’t able to contend with the “anything–no, really, anything!–goes” relativism of the potsmoderns, who in turn lack the resources to contend with the dictatorial howlings of everybody from rabid feminists to woke fascists to Muslim fundamentalists. We live in a world that is rapidly abandoning relativism for a new morality hostile to anything true, good, or beautiful. That’s the “postliberal” part. The “ecclesiocentric” part argues that any sane response to the world we now live in has to begin with the church at the center. The Civitas Project exists to figure out what, exactly, that might mean. The project existed for a few years before going public with the podcast, and has also produced a book of essays, Hell Shall Not Prevail, which is well worth reading.

On the podcast, Peter and James mostly interview academics from a wide variety of fields. If you’ve been hanging out here long, Gentle Reader, you know that I’m not entirely without academic chops, but I gotta tell you, I’m nowhere near the stratospheric level of the average Civitas guest. So how’d I end up on the show? Peter and James got interested in coming down to the other end of the spectrum to chat with some practitioners. Peter was kind enough to think of me, and given his area of interest, I immediately thought of Joe Anderson. The resulting conversation was a great deal of fun, and you can hear it online or wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy it!

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Posted by Tim Nichols

Reading Both Books

29 October 2024

Read the first few chapters of Matthew, and take note of the Old Testament prophecies he cites. When Matthew cites Micah 5:2, the meaning is very clear. God made a predictive prophecy about where the Messiah would be born, and that prophecy is fulfilled when Jesus is born in that exact town. But that’s not the only thing “fulfill” means here.

Consider “Out of Egypt I called My son.” The son in question in Hosea 11 is Israel—not just the man Jacob (although he’s included) but the whole nation that came from him. “When Israel was a child I loved him” might refer to the man Jacob, but “out of Egypt I called My son” can’t mean just that one guy, because that guy died in Egypt, and what was called out of Egypt was not that one man, but all his descendants, 400 years later. So “Out of Egypt I called My son” is the utterance of a prophet, but it’s not a predictive prophecy; it’s a comment on Israel’s history. In what sense can it be “fulfilled”?

In order to grasp Matthew’s point here, we must first pay careful attention to the meaning of Hosea. Knowing that Israel is God’s son, Matthew shows how Jesus walks in the steps of Israel. He’s making two points: first, that Jesus is Israel (in a meaningful sense that Matthew will spend the whole book exploring), and second, that the land of Israel has become spiritual Egypt—a point that would be reinforced by John the Baptist when he calls the remnant out into the desert to pass through water. Jesus adds to Hosea; we can’t read Hosea 11 anymore without also thinking of Jesus’ flight from Herod as well as the Exodus. The words of the prophet have been “fulfilled,” made more full than they were before.

We don’t want to read something into the text that isn’t there. At the same time, we don’t want to miss something that is there—and the New Testament writers show us repeatedly that there’s a lot more there than one might think at first glance. From Jesus Himself proving the resurrection by exegeting a verb tense in Genesis to the fulfillments of the first few chapters of Matthew to the dizzying displays of Hebrews, the New Testament authors show us a way of reading the Old Testament that we wouldn’t have come up with on our own. It had to be revealed to us.

In theologically conservative circles, we have gotten our hermeneutics from the Book of Nature (mostly as read by E. D. Hirsch), which is very useful as far as it goes. But there’s two books, and the Book of Scripture also has something to teach us about how to read. We should read both books.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

It’s Not All Foreplay, Pt. 2

22 October 2024

We ended part one with a question: it’s easy enough to see why pagans might believe that all intimacy is ultimately the same, and all leads to sexual intimacy, but what would possess Christians to think that?

Fear, that’s what.

Some of it is fear of adultery. It’s a massively destructive sin, and sensible people don’t want to be anywhere near it. But then, sensible people don’t want to be in a house fire or a high-speed auto accident either, and don’t on that account cut off the electricity in their houses or refuse to drive on highways. Sensible people recognize that everything has risks, and if you think electricity is risky, reading by candlelight is not exactly risk-free. A 30-minute drive on the highway has its risks, sure, but the 60-minute drive it takes to stay off the highway also has its fair share of risk exposure. Our problem, in this case, is that we’re sensitive to the risks of one course of action, and utterly blind to the risks of the other.

Adultery’s damage is well-known. The damage done by fearing and avoiding meaningful interaction with the opposite sex is less well understood, but no less real. Lacking an appreciation for the benefits of healthy cross-gender interaction and friendship, we see nothing there but danger. We ought to know better, because our advice to just stay away from the opposite sex does not track with how Scripture tells us to behave (but we’ll get to that).

Part of the perceived danger comes from a mythology we’ve allowed self-justifying adulterers to build up for themselves. “I don’t know how it happened!” they say. “One thing just led to another!” Too many Christians take these ridiculous claims at face value, and we really ought to know better. It’s fairly difficult to have sex by accident, unless you’re already so far compromised that the final PIV detail hardly matters anyway. But foolish Christians buy this nonsense, and then build on it: since apparently nobody, not even the adulterers, really knows how adultery happens, they conclude that men and women just need to avoid each other. Any intimacy of any type is a threat, and so they treat all intimacy as the same thing. Ironically, their fear of becoming like the world is the very thing that causes them to become like the world (no surprise if you remember Prov. 29:25). But God has not given us a spirit of fear (2 Tim. 1:7), so let’s not forget what He’s told us about sin. We are not ignorant of Satan’s devices (2 Cor. 2:11).

Some while back, I sat in a marriage counseling session with a husband who’d cheated and a wife who was deciding what to do about it. “I don’t know what happened!” he said. You know what I told him? “You just blew a hole in the bottom of the boat that is your marriage, and you’re taking on water fast. You need her help” I pointed at his wife “or you’re sunk. You need her to believe that this isn’t going to happen again. ‘I don’t know what happened!’ doesn’t inspire confidence.” As we dug into it, what we found is that his initial “I don’t know what happened” response was a defense mechanism. He didn’t want to think about it. It was just easier to say “I don’t know what happened.” Part of my job was to help him do the hard work of facing what he’d done and excavating how it happened so they could prevent it in the future. Over the next half-hour or so, he faced his sin squarely, dug into how he got there, and then we made a plan to keep him out of similarly tempting situations in the future.

What we found, of course, tracks with Scripture (and common sense). He didn’t commit adultery by accident; both parties knew what they were doing. At a certain point, a decision gets made that involves a zipper, and nobody concerned is somehow unaware of the implications of that decision. Sexual arousal is designed by God to be the sort of thing that gathers momentum as it goes, a bit like a long, steep playground slide. When they’re already three-quarters of the way down the slide, it’s easy enough to see how “one thing led to another” until they ended up in the mud puddle at the bottom. But how did they end up on that slide to start with? Answering that question is where Scripture is a big help.

God tells us: “Each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren.” The process certainly is deceptive—hence the warning against being deceived—but it’s not a mystery. God has told us all about it: we need to police our desires.

The deception comes in not believing God about this. When the desire passes through your mind, it’s not just a harmless pleasant thought. If you find yourself thinking, “I can’t…but it would be fun,” you’re already in trouble. If you think you can nurture the desire without getting hurt, you’re deceiving yourself. It’s already hurting you. And then, if you think about it long enough, it’s going to infect your behavior, one way or another. The same lies will still be with you: “It’s not hurting anybody. Besides, who’s gonna know?” If you think you can play with the sin a little bit without anything serious happening, you’re wrong. Desire conceives and gives birth to sin; sin matures and gives birth to death. So the thing to do is address the desire.

Let’s take an example. Say a particular couple’s sexual relationship is on the rocks, no matter why. He’s out there in the working world, he’s sexually hungry, and an opportunity—a willing coworker who’s particularly interested in him, say—crosses his path. What is he supposed to do with this situation?

Say no, of course, but that’s not nearly enough. He needs to kill the desire. His desire for sexual communion is a good and godly thing, and there’s exactly one person he’s to fulfill that desire with. When that desire gets misdirected onto anybody else, the thing to do is starve it ruthlessly. Don’t toy with it; don’t think about it. Give it no occasion for expression, and pray until it dies. He should turn his attentions to his wife (cf. 1 Cor. 7:2-5), and if for whatever reason his wife cannot or will not meet his legitimate needs, then he should embrace the ascetic struggle and suffer like Jesus would rather than give the enemy a victory. Jesus’ legitimate human needs were going unmet in the wilderness (food), in the Garden (companionship and emotional support), and on the cross (physical safety). We should be prepared to follow Jesus; a servant is not greater than his Master.

But this is not to say that the man has to go it alone. Christians are meant to live giving and receiving daily encouragement. Particularly in times like these, a believer needs the support of his brothers and sisters. How does that work? Stay tuned.

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Posted by Tim Nichols

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